Isola
By Allegra Goodman
Published 2025
Read Feb 2026
This is a rather unique historical fiction novel. While this reader shies away from historical fiction where the actions and particularly the feelings of a real person are the focus of the book, this one worked for this reader.
The story is based on Marguerite de la Rocque, an heiress, whose parents are gone and whose guardian is Jean Fracois de la Rocque de Roberval. Several accounts exist about here, including one in a book of stories by Queen Margerite of Navarre. All agree Roberval is commissioned to set up a Catholic French colony in the New World that he takes Marguerite (age 20) and her nurse with him, and that Marguertie, a lover she takes on the ship, and her nurse are abandoned on a island off the coast of the New World. Further she somehow is rescued and returns to France where she eventually is associated with a school. But since only these thin bones of her story are known, Goodman has wide berth to fictionalize Marguerite’s story and provide the reader with an engaging, exciting, and sometimes raw story of this woman and those around her. Readers are provided with a sense of the times she inhabited, the trappings both good and bad as a young female ward of high standing, and especially the trials she and her companions face after they are abandoned.
Reese Witherspoon picked this novel as her Feb 2025 selection. This action seemed to have prompted Amazon, and perhaps others, to advertise the book as “Isola: Reese’s Book Club: A Novel”. Regardless, this reader does recommend this book as a rousing read.
MarshaReads.com 